April, 9, 2001 archives

well, i guess there's at least one way to make the metric system take off. make it illegal to use pounds and ounces.

cbs has sued fox over 'boot camp' being a 'rip-off' of 'survivor'. and i'm sure cbs's some of my best friends is the pinnacle of original programming.

so windows xp won't support usb 2.0 or bluetooth when it is released. they are, of course, spinning this as having chosen to support superior alternatives (ieee 1394 "firewire" and 802.11b, respectively). why don't they just confess that they're limiting the scope of xp so they can actually get it out the door? after all, you have to release frequently if you expect to make recurring revenue from software. at least, until they make everyone start leasing software....

so, it turns out that yet another commercial shopping cart application has security holes, despite third-party audit firms and an internal quality-assurance team. i actually met up with the pdg software once, and it really struck me as quite unpolished. (and how is breaking into ecommerce sites and emailing them a sign of bravado? theft seems pretty cowardly to me.)

so it turns out that cbs has fought this battle before, but from the other side. it's all so childish -- people are very quick to leap to the law (copyright, patent) when they want to protect their turf, but feel free to ignore it when it is someone else's turf.